Your first retro

By the end of this you will have run a real retro with your team and have a closed summary to show for it. It takes about 25 minutes of session time.

You need a ScatterSpoke workspace and a few colleagues who can open a link. Nothing needs to be configured first.

1. Create the board

Go to Retros in the sidebar and select New retro.

You land in the templates gallery, filtered to retro boards. Pick Start / Stop / Continue — it’s three columns, it’s forgiving, and it produces an actionable list.

A confirm panel opens showing the format’s three columns, a mini preview of the board, and a Best for line. Type a title — Sprint 24 retro — and select Create retro.

You are now on the board, and you are its facilitator.

2. Get everyone in

Your board opens members only: signed-in colleagues can reach it, and nobody else can.

In the dock at the bottom of the board, open Share, then Copy board link. Paste it into your team channel.

As people arrive their avatars appear in the top bar.

3. Gather the feedback

The board opens in the Feedback phase, and the stepper in the top bar shows where the room is: Feedback → Vote → Review.

Tell everyone to add cards. Each column has an Add a card box at the top and a prompt under its header — What should we begin?, What should we end?, What is working? Typing and pressing Enter posts the card and leaves the box open for the next one.

Give the room a timebox. In the dock, open Timer and select 5 min. The countdown appears in everyone’s top bar and turns red in the last minute.

While people write, you’ll see one card of your own and a set of grey Feedback hidden until reveal placeholders. That’s expected: new boards keep feedback private until you open it, so nobody’s first card steers everyone else’s.

4. Reveal what people wrote

When the timer runs out, select Reveal in the dock.

Every card’s text and author appear at once, for everyone. Read them aloud, or give the room two quiet minutes to read for themselves.

5. Vote

In the dock, select Next: Vote. A short banner tells everyone you moved the room.

Each person now has five dot votes. They spend them by selecting the ▲ button on any card — several votes can go on the same card, and the ▬ button next to it takes one back. The pill in your top bar counts down as you spend.

Give this two minutes. It doesn’t need a timer.

6. Discuss the top of the list

Select Next: Review.

The board becomes a spotlight: a votes-sorted list on the left, and one enlarged card in the middle that everyone is looking at. Select the top card in the list to put it on the stage.

Talk about it. Anything the team decides goes in the Comments panel under the card — that’s the record that survives the session.

When the conversation is done, select Next card in the dock. The spotlight moves to the next unvisited card, and the one you just did gets a green check. Work down until the votes thin out.

7. Close it

Select Finish & summarize in the dock. A confirmation shows the tallies — cards, votes, comments, people — and tells you the board becomes read-only for everyone.

Select End retro.

You land on the Summary: the top-voted cards in order, a bar per column showing where the energy went, the team’s temperature average, and your session’s stats.

Select Export cards & votes (CSV) and you have the whole board as a file.

What you just learned

You ran the default shape of a ScatterSpoke retro: a guided board through Feedback, Vote, and Review, closed into a permanent summary.

From here:

• Running a retro — the choices you skipped: run style, anonymity, guest links, vote budgets
• Retro formats — twenty formats to run next time
• Retrospective best practices — making the next one better than this one